Imagine if you were working at the Time Management Bureau, how would you fix the timeline for the crypto market in 2024? I think I will continue to delay the Ethereum mainnet Cancun upgrade and ensure that the Super Memecoin Cycle does not happen. In this timeline, the main storyline of the Crytpo industry will be the DA (Data Availability) War between Ethereum and Celestia, the L2 airdrop farm craze will continue throughout the year, the L2 DA tax scale captured by the Ethereum mainnet will be 10 to 100 times larger than it is now, the Raas project Caldera's TGE will become a highly anticipated phenomenon level event, ETH's secondary market price will steadily outperform BTC, Vitalik will still be a high flying machine god pointing the direction for Web3, and the analysis articles of KOLs will be exposed for more than 100000. We believe that the value investors of "Web3 changes the world" will become the biggest winners in the market. How beautiful this must be. However, the young player P and the conspiracy group raised the banner of anti elite in the Solana Foundation http://Pump.fun 、 With the blessing of GMGN, a single punch shattered the daydream of the party. The encryption industry on our current timeline is like a cyberpunk wasteland. Solana represents the vertical expansion path of the monolithic chain, while Hammer Explosion Ethereum represents the horizontal expansion path of Rollup. Modularity, AppChain, Raas, ZK, and other technological narratives have all become a thing of the past and are scattered in the wind. The widely adopted values have become symbols of immaturity, and the three plate theory has become the social currency of smart money. Standing at this crossroads of history, our ears are filled with too much noise, and our eyes cannot see through the thick fog. Only the stars in the sky and the rationality in our hearts can serve as the North Star for us to navigate in the uncertain ocean. Summarize the present and look forward to the future. From the perspective of competition in the expansion route of blockchain, I make two judgments on the new order of encryption: Firstly, Solana's success in 24 years does not mean that the single high-performance chain route of "One Chain To Them All" has falsified the Rollup horizontal expansion route of multi chain coexistence. The horizontal expansion route will experience a bottoming out rebound in 25 years. Solana's success over the past 24 years has been overly reliant on the Memecoin lottery. The super cycle of Memecoin is the result of the resonance between the macroeconomic cycle and the cryptocurrency market cycle, and it is a frenzy of plundering the wealth of the weak by a conspiracy group and young smart money. Behind the dazzling and mysterious stories of wealth legends lies the cruel reality of the vast majority of market crashes and exits. After the cycle of prosperity and decline, Solana is facing an awkward situation of inadequate infrastructure such as DeFi, stablecoins, RWA, and low ecological maturity. You should know, DeFi、 Stablecoins and RWAs are the core beneficiary sectors under the new cryptocurrency order led by Trump. Except for stablecoin projects, the core protocols and leading projects of DeFi and RWA are almost all supporters of horizontal scaling. Some of them are promoting the transformation of AppChain, while others are simply native AppChain. During the transformation of AppChain, there are AAVE, Uniswap, Ondo, etc. Native AppChain includes RWA protocols Plume, OM, etc. This is because there are endogenous bottlenecks in the "impossible triangle", application specific optimization, capital efficiency, innovation iteration efficiency, and other aspects of the single high-performance chain route. So, even the Solana Foundation, which had previously insisted on a single high-performance chain route, quietly incubated SVM Rollup projects such as Soon and Solayer to counter the risks and uncertainties of fragile single high-performance chain routes. Interestingly, the Ethereum Foundation has also adopted an anti fragility strategy to incubate high-performance Rollup MegaETH. Ethereum's push for Rollup's horizontal expansion route has also gained recognition from former competitors Polkadot and Cosmos. The Polkadot community recently defined Polkadot parallel chain as a Rollup, and the new project Initia in the Cosmos ecosystem also has topological consistency with Ethereum entering the Rollup Centric era. If the Rollup horizontal expansion route can achieve Renaissance, which projects can capture Alpha value? The first is Ethereum itself, the second is Rollup L2 supported by Rollup Stack such as Arbtirum, Optimism, Zksync, and the third is Raas projects such as Caldera and Conduit. Among them, the Raas project has the greatest market valuation elasticity. Taking Caldera, which is about to become a TGE, as an example, its valuation in the last round of financing in July 2024 was between $60 million and $100 million, far lower than Altlayer's FDV of $377 million during the peak of the Rollup narrative. And Caldera's business data is much more impressive than Altlayer's. Caldera has launched over 100 production grade Rollups, processed over 370 million transactions, and served over 10 million different wallets. In the top Rollup supported by Caldera, Manta Pacific processes approximately 130000 transactions per day, while ApeChain processes approximately 120000 transactions per day, B3 processes nearly 220000 transactions per day. But to be frank, the transaction processing scale of Rollups such as Manta Pacific, ApeChain, and B3 is only at a moderate level in L1/L2 overall, while the Rollups supported by Caldera are mostly at the tail end. But this does not mean that the value of these Rollups is low. The Matthew effect is irresistible, but scenarios, communities, and cultures are diverse and cannot be measured by a single scale. Secondly, the issues of liquidity fragmentation, interactive fragmentation, and misalignment of interests between L1 and L2 that exist in the Rollup horizontal expansion route will ultimately be properly resolved. In the previous Rollup year, the Rollup project team was busy using Ethereum legitimacy and EVM compatibility, OP Rollup/ZK Rollup technology primitives, Rollup development SDK, etc., to seize the TVL, liquidity, users, and developers of the Ethereum mainnet overflow. The Ethereum mainnet development team focused on upgrading the settlement layer, data availability layer, and clearing technical debts, making Rollup interoperability issues a neglected "public land". The interoperability issues of Rollup mainly manifest in two aspects: liquidity fragmentation and interaction fragmentation. The problem of liquidity fragmentation includes: --Financial isolation: User funds are locked in different Rollups and cannot flow effectively --Decentralized exchanges are inefficient: each Rollup needs to establish an independent liquidity pool --Low capital efficiency: repeated lock ups of the same asset on different Rollups --Difficulty initiating liquidity: The new Rollup struggles to attract initial liquidity The data shows that users need to pay a Ethereum mainnet fee of $5-20 to bridge, with waiting times ranging from a few minutes to 7 days (for Optimal Rollups). This experience is far from meeting the needs of mainstream users. The issues of interaction fragmentation include: --Inconsistent bridging experience: Each Rollup has its own bridging solution and UI --Complex multi-step operations: Cross Rollup interactions often require multiple steps --Inconsistent Token Standards: Different bridges have implemented different token formats --Distributed application development resources: Developers need to customize solutions for each Rollup And now the standard solution for Rollup interoperability issues has emerged: the intention to cross chain (the core component of chain abstraction). The intention cross chain model has fundamental differences from traditional cross chain bridges: Traditional cross chain bridge: Direct Asset Transfer Model Users need to understand the bridging mechanism and target chain Multi step operation (approve, bridge, wait, confirm) Lock+Casting or Destruction+Release Model Trust assumptions are complex and pose high security risks Intention to cross chain: Declarative Execution Model Based on User Intent Users only need to express their ultimate goal ("I want to use Token A on Rollup Y") The underlying complexity is hidden from users End to end intent execution engine handles the entire process Message passing protocol ensures secure communication Support 1-on-1 and many to 1 messaging modes Complete complex cross chain operations with a single transaction Clear security model, inheriting the underlying L1 security The current cross chain solutions mainly include the ERC-7683 solution jointly launched by Uniswap and Across, Caldera's Metalayer solution, and Particle's UniversalX solution. The other two intended cross chain solutions are already familiar to the market. This article focuses on Caldera's Metalayer solution. We will quickly understand it from two dimensions: Metalayer core architecture components and Metalayer message flow. Metalayer Core Architecture Components --Intents Engine: The core of Metallayer is this powerful intent engine that allows developers to define advanced intents for cross chain execution. This engine simplifies complex operations, enabling fast asset import and declarative execution across multiple chains. This is an end-to-end intent execution engine that handles the entire process from user requests to final results. --Message Passing Protocol: A secure messaging protocol built on Hyperlane that supports two key modes: --1-on-1 message passing: directly passing messages between two chains --Multiple to one reading: allows data to be read from multiple source chains to a single target chain, ensuring reliable and secure communication between chains and providing a foundation for a wide range of cross chain applications. --MetalayerRouter: A smart contract deployed on each target chain, responsible for receiving and routing cross chain messages. --Protocol Contract: A smart contract that implements specific cross chain interaction logic to handle actual asset transfers and state updates. --Destination Chain: The target blockchain that receives and processes messages and transactions from other chains. Metalayer message flow --User initiates advanced intent (e.g. 'send Token A from Rollup X to Rollup Y') --Intents Engine captures intent and decomposes it into executable steps --Message Passing Protocol ensures secure transmission of messages to the target chain --The message is processed through the MetalayerRouter on the target chain --Protocol Contract executes specific transaction logic --Users receive assets on the target chain seamlessly and efficiently throughout the entire process --Unlike traditional bridges, users do not need to wait for confirmation time or process multiple transactions, and the entire experience is close to the smoothness of single chain interaction. In addition to the three solutions mentioned above, the Ethereum Foundation has accelerated the Pectra upgrade to provide support for chain abstraction from the mainnet execution layer after experiencing personnel changes, and has collaborated with Hyperlane, Bootnode, Arbitrarum, Optimism, Scroll, and Polygon to launch the Open Intents Framework (OIF), an intent cross chain standard framework. Driven by the awakening Ethereum Foundation and free market competition between OIF and third-party cross chain solutions, we have reason to believe that the Rollup interoperability issue will be properly resolved within 12 months. conclusion We will not see the vertical expansion route of individual chains or the horizontal expansion route of Rollup winning in the competition of blockchain expansion routes, but will see the integrated development between them where you and I are intertwined. Amidst the structural noise and structural desolation, we are experiencing a quiet shift in the blockchain paradigm - evolving from isolated blockchain islands to a highly interconnected blockchain network. In this new world, users don't need to care about which chain they are on, where assets are, or how they are bridged - they just need to express their intention, and the system will handle the complexity. Whether you are a developer, investor, or user, understanding this paradigm shift is crucial.